Glimpses #13: Sara Mearns Away from Home

Sara Mearns, studio portrait

Sara Mearns, the object of fervid admiration as a principal with the New York City Ballet, is paying a visit to Fall for Dance. This annual event, which showcases bits of every kind of dance imaginable (something for everyone, so to speak, and at a reasonable price), is sheltered at City Center and often sells out—to an audience of both newbies and old hands.

In this year’s opening program, the audience got to see a ballerina who doesn’t conform to any of the usual types we view nowadays: the lyrical, frangible heroine; the sensational athlete; the earth mother, et al. She was stolidly partnered by Casey Herd, an American who’s a principal with the Dutch National Ballet. Herd was chosen, I would guess, to match Mearns’ anti-ballerina physical type. They danced a duet, The Bright Motion, by the City Ballet’s Justin Peck to music from Mark Dancigers. Had the choreography been more inventive and focused, it might have conjured up the heroine of Willa Cather’s Song of the Lark.

Mearns did her job with a lovely clarity, yet never seemed to make her dancing look significant, never fully “owned” her role. Was this reticence due to modesty or, perhaps, the feeling that the occasion didn’t seem sufficiently “important”? I liked what Mearns did here, mostly because of my history of watching her: I like what she’s done.

Comments

I spent many years watching Casey Herd dance in Seattle, when he was coming up through the ranks at Pacific Northwest Ballet. I never found him stolid, but I did find him earnest and hardworking, and every now and then, witnessed him finding joy in the dancing. It would seem that neither he nor Mearns found much to enjoy about performing The Bright Motion, and that’s a shame, for them, and the audience.

My sense of it was that this time Peck’s choreography didn’t give Mearns much to “own.” Clean, flowing, but little more than arms sweeping up and back, and extended extensions. For some reason, the space felt circumscribed. Herd is tall, has heft, and could support pretty unobtrusively her flyaway attacks.

Tobi Tobias

I think I’m best known, nationally and internationally, for my writing about dance. Much of this work appeared in New York magazine (where I served as the journal’s dance critic for 22 years) and in Dance magazine (where I also edited the criticism for nearly a decade). I have been the sole dance critic for Bloomberg News and have also reviewed dance regularly for the Village Voice. My SEEING THINGS column at ArtsJournal is an extension of these activities. [Read More …]

Seeing Things

began life in 2003, when Douglas McLennan invited me to write for ArtsJournal. Since then, essays … [Read More...]